Truth does not abandon the hearts that fly free.
Stories of my grandmothers.
My grandmother on my mother's side, Juanita Airington Kolhs, passed away when my mother was only four years old. Her early death left behind stories that unfortunately took years to unfold and were yet to be told to me years into my mother's elderhood. My father’s mother, Audrey Mae Stanton Bonner, was with us until 1976. I was a young mother and 28 years old when she passed. Known as Deedee mom to her family. I had the privilege of knowing her and spending a great deal of time with her while I growing up and all throughout my early adult life.
As young wives and mothers both of my grandmothers packed water when needed, milked cows, grew vegetables and flowers. Harvested corn, beets, tomatoes, potatoes, and more. They both rode horses, and not for pleasure. Raised chickens and children along side of each other. My father told me his mother carried baby chicks in her apron when working outside to protect them from harm. I remember Deedee mom telling me when she was in and out of sleep after coming home from nursing home after care to, "Remember to leave a pan by the faucet for the water to drip in for the chickens." A statement that I reflected on as a young mother myself at the time. My Grandmothers loved their babies with compassion and protection and demonstrated strength and courage in times of trial that reflected that love.Stories of these were brought to me by my parents. My Grandmother's carried courage in their hearts and handed that courage to me.
I know this. I am the first daughter still standing. I know this because I am a witness to their love and carry it deep in my heart and soul. There are two stories here. I will write about my grandmother Juanita and my mother first.
I am the daughter of a mother who loved me deeply. She was raised without a mother from the age of four. Yet she knew how to love. I was deeply loved. Never truely abandoned except at my own will. Life's lessons, my choices, my mistakes, the trials, and suffering from them all became my teachers. I take full responsibility! The loss of my grandmother created unknown strength and courage in my mother to love deeply and do her best. She accomplished just that.
My mother was left alone early by her mother, to an illness of hidden truths that stories and letters barely revealed. From those family stories and letters that I've read, I beleive my grandmother Juanita suffered from depression, which today in young mothers is diagnoised as postpartum depression or PPD. Certainly not a recognised medical diagnosis in 1933. Her passing was from an unfortunate miscarriage of her fourth child which took her life on June 23, 1933. There was some concern that arose from me in having read a few letters to my grandmother Juanita's husband, Sunny Kolhs from my grandmother Juanita's mother, Florence Airington. One letter Florence wrote in July of 1933, stated how sorry that she could not come out from Hayward, California where she and the rest of the Airington's lived at the time to Fruita, Colorado where my grandparents had settled. In the letter my great grandmother wrote that she was sorry she hadn't written Juanita more often. She wrote that it was the same old stuff going on for Juanita and she knew that my grandfather Sunny and his family had been doing all they could for her. It was distressing for me when I first read this letter. This letter and several others were kept in a cigar box in a trunk that would come to my mother the year before she passed away. In that trunk the letters would also be a purse that belonged to Juanita. In that purse was a undetermined medical perscription for Juanita that had not been filled as best I could figure out. My grandmother was one of eight children. There were sevral letters from other members of the Airington family urging Sunny to come to California so Juanitia's family could help him with the children. This was something he could not do. As one of seven children himself, his parents and siblings all lived in Fruita and that is where his livelyhood as a farmer was as well. There are stories from my mother about how the Kohls family helped with the children. At one point early in the first year of Jaunita's passing my mother went to live with her aunt up the road from her father. It's never enough and being without her mother as her father worked endlessly on the farm left her tangled in un-named grief the whole of her life. One day on one of her visits to Anacortes, Washington where I was living and raiising my daughters, we were in a antique store in La Conner, WA called Nasty Jack's. Upstairs there was a rocking chair and when my mom saw it she said, "Oh my gosh that is the same rocking chair daddy sat in for so long, and I though he would never stop crying." That was one of the first time's she had eer shared anything about that time in her life with me. I beganto understand that my grandfather had no idea how to take care of the three young children born close in age together as he continued his work as a farmer of eighty acres. The sadness remained burried in their grieving hearts. This grief and pain settled deep in my mother's blood and bones from the moment of her mother's tragic death and would take her breath away. She suffered from asthma as a child and adult, and would pass away from emphazema, COPD and peripheral neuropathy.
My grandfather Sunny worked hard from sun up to sun down. He grieved the loss of his wife. They were very much in love as my mother tells the story. However, without any support for the heartache he and his children were experiencing, they were all left with the tragedy and grief to carry on. Sunny would eventually marry his housekeeper that he hired sometime after Juanita's death, a story of it's own that I will not share here. The trunk would sit in my mother's closet of the bedroom where she grew up. She told me she remembered it was in her bedroom closet as a child. The trunk would eventually come back to her by very sweet relatives, who drove from Colorado to Washington state where my parents eventually retired. The remains of some of Juanita's things were still in the trunk, including many family photos, the many letters my grandfather that had been saved over the years, and a lock of my grandmother's hair.
I read the letters in the trunk, that was carried from Colorado to my mother by great grand nieces in 2014, the summer before mom passed away at the age of 86. I was 67 years old.
As the first granddaughter that trunk and the photos and letters of condolences was left to me and had in my closet aince 2015, before I finally read and labeld the letters, sorted out her things and after heart felt turmoil, I needed to empty it completely, saving a few items and then taking the trunk to the second hand store. Thia was in 2024. The old trunk now a treasure for someone else.
Before all that however, my mother and I went through all that was in that trunk. We did not read the letters in the cigar box together, she may have when I was not with her. I dont know. Each time I visited her to go through the trunk I would record my mother telling me stories. Each photo becoming another page in her history for me as we went through them. I noticed the beautiful stories and the sorrows in her heart that she carried for so long lifted some of her pain and created a space for joy during those days. I knew then how she learned to deeply love herself and her five children and her life. She did not allow the pain to confuse or manipulate her love. Nor did she allow the love between her parents that she felt and remembered to vanish from her heart.
My courageous mother was too young to be a breathless and motherless child. My Grandmother was too young to die. I know this because I feel it and I carry it in my heart. There were gaps in our relationship of course. How could there not be. As the oldest of five children, I sometimes was left to wander, growing up with that vulnerability and yearning for the answers that hid in a void. My mother did not know how to willingly share her pain and yet and still, she did in her actions that I came to understand. There were gaps and quietness which I witnessed in her not being able to show up for me at a school play or music concert or a gathering outside our family. In time as we worked together going through the contents in the trunk, which took a few months because too much was too much at one time, her heart softened to be able to share what she had long been holding in. She told me stories that were told to her about her mother, my grandmother. The fastest rider, the best at catching fish. How the children ran barefoot and free and played joyfully and without fear. “Little urchins we were called by some of the farming neighbors”, my mother said.
Healing stories. For truth does not abandon the hearts that fly free.
I'm the first daughter still standing now and I carry these stories and deep healing in my heart. I share them willingly.
Conversations held as miracles.
I carry the wisdom of the now untangled grief and weave it with the heart of my mother and grandmother with love, with the deep love, that was gifted to me from their lives and their courageous stories and experiences. Healing that did not come without the tangled, strangling grief of a breathless child left wandering, vulnerable, and motherless, holding on the love in her heart and courageously offering that love to me and each one of her beloved children.
I know this now. Because I am the first daughter still standing and I am my mother's witness.
The story of my father's mother, Audrey Mae Stanton Bonner, is beautiful and courageous and painful. She first came to visit us when I was just learning to talk. My father wanted me to understand that his mother was coming to visit. I did not call my father daddy or Dada, I called him Deedee. He told me Deedee's mom was coming to visit. Thereafter, she was always Deedee mom to me, and throughtout her life to the rest of her grandchildren and family. Deedee mom was at our home for every birth. She cared for my mother and the new baby, she cooked and cleaned while mom rested from childbirth and nurtured us all. There are five children in our family. Deedee mom was there when my dad and I brought my baby brother and mom home from the hospital, their fifth and very unexpected child. I was fourteen at the time, I became her helper. There was much for me to do. Several months later when it was time for Deedee mom to leave, I stayed the helper of caring for my baby brother. I wheeled him in his stroller as I sold Girl Scout cookies all around the neighborhood. He was the center of attention at sleepovers and birthday parties.
Deedee mom was left to care for herself and her two sisters when she was about 12 years old. Her mother had passed away from an illness that I dont remember ever talking to her about. There are no stories that I can remember of her mother's illness. Never the less, Deedee mom became quite self relient at a very early age. My father tells me that when he was a boy he drove cattle with his father on a cattle ranch that they worked on. My grandmother was the cook for the ranch hands, dad said. He has stories that he has written about and so I wont try to go between the lines here. My dad's family stories, which have been written and told by him have been recorded and preserved. They are wonderful in their own right. They are on our website, with his own link, Bob Bonner's Stories.
What I will write about is what I learned from Deedee mom. I spent a great deal of time with her. I stayed with her many weekends. By the time I was ten years old I knew how to make dresses and worked with her on hand made quilt projects. Every one of her grandchildren was given a handmade quilt at some point in their childhood. Her quilts were a part of us. When I was a young girl Deedee mom was a caretaker for a priest in a Catholic Church in Santa Clara, California. I would help her in her work. We would shop together. She taught me how to set the table for serving the priest breakfast and dinner, where to place the silver, the crystal glasses, the bell next to his chair that he would ring if he needed something. I learned how to cook in a style of presentation for the table. Beautiful side dishes with various colors and displays, just like in the cooking magazines. I learned how to buy a pork roast and how to make jello salad in just the right mold and with just the right fruit. In the evening she would sew on her machine and I would watch her, sometimes helping. One weekend she decided I needed a new pair of pajamas. I stood by her sewing machine and watched her sew me a pair of blue flowered, flannel pajamas that I wore to bed that night.
In the Spring of 1976 she had been suffering from breast cancer and was just home from being in an after care nursing center. My father asked me if I would spend time with her. My children were 1 1/2 and 3 1/2 years old. We stayed with her for about a month. She was mostly bed ridden, but slowly found energy. We would sit together and go through her photo albums. She would share her stories and treasures. We would cook together. One day she got up from bed, knowing I would be leaving soon, and made me a beautiful pink flowered, long flannel nightgown. I was going back to Washingtion where I lived and she wanted me to be warm. I had made pajamas and robes for my children from what she taught me, so they did not have a need at the time. Those precious days were the last that I would be with my Deedee mom.
Endearing to me was her commitment to every year making each grandchild a special birthday cake. For every birthday she somehow managed to show up to make a cake, and always from scratch, even the frosting. She had a very special musical birthday cake plate that played happy birthday. I learned to make the best apple dumplings and carrot cake and yes, the best german chocolate cake ever from her. I flew to her funeral in California the Fall of 1976 with my little daughters, just a few months after we had spent that precious month together, to join my family and the hundreds that attended her funeral at the Methodist church in Santa Clara where she was a member. Deedee mom is buried at the Mission Cemetary in Santa Clara. Her son Leroy Bonner, was layed to rest next to her after his passing in 1996.
I am the first daughter still standing. I am a mother. I am a Grandmother.
I am deeply loved. And I love deeply.
I am sometimes breathless with pain. I have healing stories of my own to share. I speak of them willingly, but not always. I learned this from all the beautiful women in my family who carried courage in their hearts. Released. Freed from wandering, knowing my heart and my path.
My daughters will not be breathless. Too often. My mother is no longer breathless. She Flies Free.
My daughters are deeply loved. I know this, because I see it, I feel it in their children, my six grandchildren. My grandchildren are deeply loved. They deeply love. I know this because I witness their love. I am their Grandmother. I am still standing.
My Grandmothers rode horses.
They carried courage in their hearts and passed it on to me. Courage to deeply love, held firmly like the strength of a horse that holds all the wisdom the ancestors carry. Passing it down through their hearts, with the power and strength of a horse, yet gentle as the soft downy feathers of a baby chick, like the smooth leather of a saddle bag.
I know this. I am Grandmother still standing. I hold the wisdom oh my ancestors in each breath I take.
I’ve learned how to breathe. They have gifted me the understanding, the wisdom of their trials, pain, and suffering and courage. The power in my Grandmothers, in my mother, is the the power of their endless courage to love deeply. I know this.
I am First Daughter, Still Standing.
Photo taken by Chuck Britt, on December 24, 2024 at Grandview Cemetary, Anacortes WA. Where my parents are buried.